Reading through this thread, I can't help but feel that the American education system is sorely lacking. During the cold war and after the Russians put sputnik into space, there seemed to be a consensus and a social focus on the need to teach young Americans math and science. After 911, the issue of foreign students attending American graduate schools was brought to national attention. It seems that although foreign students pose a security risk, there aren't enough American graduate students with the knowledge and the interest to fill all the graduate positions.
It just seems odd to me that as a country that pays so much lip service to Math and Science, we're constantly churning out high school students who don't even know the difference between a Scientific Theory and a conjecture/hypothosis; that a country that was once so eager to wage a battle of technology and science with Russia, is populated by so many who can't tell the difference between Science and Religion; that a country which claims to be the most techonogically creative country on the planet, is home to people who think that vaccines cause autism. Watson, the American co-discoverer of DNA's double helix structure, shares the same citizenship as people who think the earth is only six thousand years old.
I guess its a tribute to our pluralistic society that a biologist engineering the solution to antibiotic-resistant bacteria shops in the same grocercy store as a school-board member who thinks that intelligent design is a scientific theory. Either that, or god's cosmic sense of humor makes him the best ironic dramatist since Shakespear.
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And if you say to me tomorrow, oh what fun it all would be.
Then what's to stop us, pretty baby. But What Is And What Should Never Be.
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